If you were to add a policy to split multicarts, you'd start a debate about defining a multicart.

Is Duck Hunt a multicart? It contains both ducks mode and clay pigeons mode, which use largely disjoint music and sound effect data but may use the same music engine.

Action 52 is organized as a multicart and inspired by multicarts. But the games all debuted on the multicart. And because they're all statically linked to the same music engine, combining their music data into one NSF saves bytes.

Is Sunday Funday (1995) a multicart? It includes a Christian-themed hack of Menace Beach along with the game Fish Fall which was discovered elsewhere as a standalone prototype (called Free Fall) and a bonus music track. (Incidentally, Fish Fall opens with "Polly Wolly Doodle", a year before the same song appeared in Pokémon Red Version as "Road to Viridian City".)

Applying the same logic to SNSF, a PSF format for Super NES: Is Super Mario All-Stars a multicart? All four games debuted earlier on the Famicom, but the ports are original to All-Stars, and games other than Super Mario Bros. 3 appear to share much of their data.

You have to deal with thousands of sound files all alone. So in order to deal with lesser files I merge multicarts into 1 NSF, plus I never liked the idea of splitting games into separate NSFs from a multicart (since the games being on the same cartridge should belong in 1 music file - if that makes any sense).So it is highly possible that I may do the same thing with Quattro Adventure too and probably with Caltron 6 in 1 (since in my archive what is present now a shitty Famitracker converted NSF file what I made years ago when I had little to no idea about ASM programming).

If you find yourself having as many play routines as games on the multicart, you probably should put each game into a separate NSF file. If your multicart's games were originally or subsequently released (or leaked) individually, you've got a multicart. For example, all Caltron 6-in-1 games were originally released individually. The Quattro games are a bit of a special case, as the games were separate games on their original home computer platforms, but not on the NES; even here however, each game can be extracted and run as a separate ROM image with minimal effort.

MrNorbert1994 wrote:

since the games being on the same cartridge should belong in 1 music file - if that makes any sense

You want to rip cartridges as opposed to games. I want game music, not cartridge music.

And if your desire is to minimize the amount of NSF files, then adding a multicart NSF consisting of games that were also released individually only serves to increase the amount of NSF files in a "complete" archive, since you would have to account for the individual releases with separate NSF files as well. And if you are going to remove any NSF of an individually-released game that was ALSO put on a multicart somewhere, then you might as well remove the NSF of every NROM game under the sun because it ended up on someone's multicart.

Certainly I wouldn't rip things like 31 In 1, and NROM games based multicats, but when if I have a multicart which has games that were never released separetely, (like the Quattro series for example) then why bother them to release them as a separated NSF.

IMO single game NSFs, especially non-bankswitching, have more utility, so if I had to pick one or the other I'd go with splitting, but personally I'd want to see both versions where they're both known, e.g. DH+SMB as well as DH and SMB. Makes them easier to find.

I wouldn't really want to split hairs about what is or is not a "multicart", just do whichever seems useful/practical? For something like Caltron 6-in-1 or Action 52 I don't even remember the names of the individual games.

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